B-Rant

- submitted by Linda Keenan on 04/04/2008

  

'Moogle' the Seller and Other Uncommon Tips for Buying a House

By Linda Keenan

I'm minutes from closing on my first house, and as the Chief Financial Officer of my family, I'm racing through the mental check list. Photo ID? In hand. Gay mortgage broker I have a crush on? In the conference room. Seller's attorney? En route. Six-figure check to buy the place where my son will daydream about his first love, open his SAT scores, pose for prom pictures? It was my "Oh My F-ing God" house-closing moment. I had left the check sitting amidst Ritz crackers in my unlocked car.

I'd like to think of this as the one thing I bungled in my transformation from hardened, renting urban dweller to first-time suburban homeowner. But months after closing the deal, I realized there was some due diligence I had never considered. Believe me, I had covered all the obvious things like school stats, current prices, and town incomes, but these are the things I never read in a home-buying guide that I wish someone had told me:

1. Your buyer's agent isn't your best friend.
I should say at the outset I never trusted my agent, nor did I expect to. I know, I know, many of you out there have fabulous agents who have become your ambassador to your new town, the person you're thrilled to run into at Starbucks. But I was always wary of someone who had a vested interest in getting us to buy a house as quickly as possible.

For me, this all crystalized minutes after closing when, for the first time, our agent and the seller's agent began chit-chatting like old college roommates. They had clearly known each other for decades, something they kept to themselves before the deal was done. We were clueless about just how tight they were, and the close relationship surely could have hurt us during negotiation.

2. "Moogle" the seller.
By "moogle," I mean Google your seller's mortgage. I actually did know this before I bought), but I figured others might benefit from the knowledge. The seller's mortgage (everyone's mortgage) is public record. In many places, it can be found online, and you could start out by googling your town's registry of deeds. If you can't find it online, you can go directly to town hall. Knowing how much debt the seller is carrying is good information to have when you are negotiating.

3. Scope out your neighbors.
I'm not knocking my neighbors, but while we have the sassy, sultry divorcee next door, the sweet aging sisters a few doors down, and the empty nesters straight across, what we don't have are families with toddlers. Little did I know that at town hall you can find out the ages of everyone who lives around you. Before buying a house, looking this up would have seemed, well, a bit psychotic, even to me. Now, as I long for easy play dates and lifelong friends for my toddler, I wish I had known I could have researched this.

4. Think long and hard about where your house actually sits.
This seems obvious, but there are aspects to where your house is that I didn't consider. We are on a main drag, and I thought I considered all the relevant issues: the din of traffic, safety, possible resale problems etc. I didn't think to myself that being on a main drag, even one with sidewalks, meant that a real, thriving neighborhood is much harder to have. I was crushed at Halloween when we felt compelled to borrow a new friend's 'real' neighborhood to Trick or Treat, and when we came home, no one had taken our candy, even though our house was all lit up.

5. Your swinging single-person life is gone.
As someone who came from the city and a full-time job, I clung to priorities that, as a stay at home mom living in the suburbs, don't apply to me now. We spent a lot more money buying a house close to the town center because I had this image of walking into town all the time, since I had come from such a walking culture in Manhattan. I have walked to town exactly once since moving in. I also thought it was important to be close to the train lines, even though neither myself nor my husband currently use the trains. So we are close to the trains. So close I hear the 5:30 am express each and every morning. Which brings us to Things I Wish I Knew Number 6....

6. Check out the house at odd times of day.
If you work, keep in mind that you are not going to live there during the day, which might be the time you'll be looking at the house with an agent. Nights, mornings and weekends are times where home life is happening for most people these days. The environment can be drastically different depending on the time you see it. For instance, I assumed that having sidewalks, and being close to town meant there would be some ‘bustle' at night, dog-walking, neighborly hello's, something, ANYTHING. No such luck.

7. Do the commute.
Don't just look up the traffic patterns like my damn husband did, assuring me from all his fancy schmancy incomprehensible maps and blinking interactive websites that the commute was fine, just fine. It is a solid 15 minutes, maybe even 20 minutes longer than he insisted it was. Do the commute, and not on a holiday either.

8. Eden needs a lawnmower.
That massive backyard might look like paradise itself, but you are either going to have to pay someone to keep it up, or haul your lazy tuches out there to work on it. As a first-time homebuyer and long-time city dweller, I completely underestimated yard work.

9. Prepare for the hidden costs of suburban life. This relates to "Eden needs a lawnmower." It's easy to forget, as an urban dweller, that you might actually have to BUY a lawnmower, not to mention use it. Or find a landscaper. Or pay a chimney sweep. And how much is the wood for that fireplace, anyway? Oh, there are fees for that beautiful lake in town that you just thought was a perk of living here? And what in HELL is this mysterious surcharge on my water bill?

Of course, most buyers know there's maintenance you have to factor into any home purchase but I would recommend talking at length to someone who has a house, preferable in the town or the area you're moving to, and getting the whole financial picture.

10. Prepare for joy: priceless. I should add one more thing I wish someone told me before I bought my house, because had I known this, I actually might have bought even sooner: that my beloved son would bounce up and down in his car seat as we approach our home, squealing in delight, and saying "Look Mom! There's our house! That's my house! Hi House!" That's worth all the hidden costs, chimney-sweeping, and lawnmowing in the world.

Linda Keenan is a contributing writer at Burbia. Linda worked 7 years as a head writer/senior producer for various programs on CNN. Before that she worked as a writer/producer for Bloomberg TV. She now writes satire, primarily about parenting culture, at Thoroughly Modern Mommy...read more rants